Headlines & Head Wounds

Break

Gwendolyn was supposed to be on vacation.

She'd been planning this for weeks. She'd packed her bags at least three days ago. She'd had her plane tickets neatly folded in her pocket when the attendant had asked for them, and she'd remembered to store exactly two and a half sticks of wintergreen gum in her wallet for the flight. Once she'd arrived in Seattle, she'd shouldered her way through the crowd at the airport, caught a taxi just as it was pulling into the pick-up area, and arrived at her hotel room exactly six minutes and forty-five seconds after check-in opened.

Gwendolyn had a longtime habit of planning. She made it her business to know, at all times, what she was doing and when she was going to do it. She knew exactly what she had scheduled for the entire week, what she had thought might be interesting, what she had decided were must-see destinations, and when she was scheduled to come home.

And Gwendolyn was bored out of her mind.

The plaza she'd been sitting in for the last half-hour was supposed to have one of the most iconic views of the Space Needle in all of Seattle. She didn't actually want to go into the Space Needle, of course- although she would never have admitted it, Gwendolyn had a strong dislike of heights- but the point remained: she was supposed to be enjoying herself, and she couldn't seem to think about anything worthwhile. Or anything at all, really- except for how bored she was.

Well, actually, there was one thing that she couldn't seem to stop thinking about.

No, Gwendolyn told herself, no, I'm not going to bother with that. I don't even know where she lives.

It had been a little over a month since Gwendolyn had "solved" the Hathaway murder case. She'd gotten the credit for it, of course; she'd been interviewed by several different press organizations and had secured a meager pay raise. But she hadn't actually solved it. That honor belonged to Rhiannon Valdez and Sylvia Stein.

Gwendolyn had visited Sylvie several times since the case had blown over- mostly by trying to find her at the Gazette offices or at Hatfeld High, as she had no idea where Sylvie lived. But as for Rhiannon, Gwendolyn hadn't even thought to contact her since. Somehow, it just seemed too intrusive.

With embarrassment, Gwendolyn realized that she was treating Rhiannon as she might a senior investigative officer. She hadn't visited Rhiannon because- what, because she was jealous? No, because she didn't know where Rhiannon lived.

She could call and find out, she reminded herself.

There was a girl waiting in the middle of the plaza, by the fountain. She'd been sitting there for several minutes, but Gwendolyn hadn't really registered her being there until just then. She didn't know much, but she seemed to remember that a someone had told the girl to wait there. She was a very young girl- three years old at most- but the sparkly silver backpack she was wearing, along with her fuzzy boots, provided well enough evidence that she was being cared for. If someone had told her to wait there, they'd be back in a few minutes. Which, of course, was the only explanation- the girl wouldn't be there, alone, otherwise. Gwendolyn felt sure she would have noticed if the girl had arrived alone.

She couldn't keep turning everything into an investigation, Gwendolyn reminded herself. Because not everything was an investigation. She'd never been one to believe that everything happened for a reason, and she wasn't even remotely close to being a conspiracy theorist. But Gwendolyn was a detective, and she tended to see complexity in everyday life. She tended to overanalyze.

Ostensibly, she'd taken this vacation so she could get her mind off everything that had happened in Skybrook. There wasn't exactly much, but a series of odd things had started to happen after the Hathaway murder. A boy had tried to rob his parents in one of the subdivisions on the east side of town. A girl at the school had purposefully injured a classmate during a volleyball game. A series of burglaries on Woodcreek Street had baffled most of her investigators, until Officer Redmond suggested looking into the teachers.